This past August did you see the Perseids
meteor shower? Did you work any of the meteor plasma trails on amateur
radio VHF (6 or 2 meters)? Iíve seen many reports of moderate success
for operators in various regions of the world during the 2007 Perseids
season. Along with working meteors, a mix of tropospheric ducting often
occurs in some regions, and I wonder if the two propagation modes ever
combine. Iím interested in hearing from you if youíve observed and
worked such combinations of VHF propagation.

The 2007 autumn meteor season is open for DX
hunters. While the Perseids meteor shower is one of the impressive
yearly showers, partly due to the time of year in which it appears, the
showers that will occur over the next few months are great rivals.

The Next Shower

One of the largest yearly meteor showers
occurs during November. Appearing to radiate out of the constellation
Leo from November 10 through November 23, the Leonids will peak on the
night of November 17 and the early morning of November 18. This shower
is known to create intense meteor bursts. Since the source of the
Leonids, the Tempel-Tuttle comet, passed closest to the sun in February
of 1998, the years following were expected to produce very strong
displays. The greatest display since 1998 was the peak of 3,700 meteors
per hour in 1999. Every year since then has been significantly less
spectacular. However, a few (lonely) forecasters think that we still
might have a meteor storm with an hourly rate of thousands of meteors
sometime in the next several years. The more common forecast is that
weíll only have a rate of about 15 meteors per hour.

The best time to work meteor scatter off the
Leonids is around 11:30 PM, local time, in the Northern Hemisphere. The
shower should increase in rate the closer you get to midnight, and then
move down toward pre-dawn.

A Possible Meteor Storm in November?

Keep alert for the a-Monocerotids shower,
which will occur from November 15 through November 25. The peak will
occur on November 22 at 0310 UTC. Normally, this shower produces about
five meteors per hour, but this year it may produce a burst as high as
400 per hour. The most recent big burst was in 1995 with a reported ZHR
(zenith hourly rate) of about 420. It was expected that the ten-year
cycle would result in a large storm in 2005, but that never occurred.
That is why we should stand ready this year, as the cycle could be
longer than anticipated.

Will this be the year of a return of the
storm-level activity? If so, it will make the prospect for exciting
meteor-shower radio propagation probable. We just cannot know for sure,
since it takes a direct interaction with the comet dust trail by the
Earth in order to see such a higher rate of meteors entering the
atmosphere.

The chances of Earth hitting a dust trail
that is so narrow and filamentary are slim. This has proven true for
most meteor showers in recent years, when we have missed various meteor
trails nearly completely. During these misses, Earth slips between the
clouds, where there is only a sprinkling of meteoroids.